Restraining Government in America and Around the World

Election Postmortem

A good night for Republicans. The House elections were a bloodbath. Nancy Pelosi will no longer be speaker, three senior Committee Chairmen were ousted (Oberstar in Minnesota, Spratt in South Carolina, and Skelton in Missouri), and Republicans will gain more than 60 seats when all is said and done.

The Senate elections, however, were probably a bit disappointing to the GOP. It’s strange to say that when they picked up at least six new seats, particularly considering the fact that they had more seats to defend, but expectations matter, and some Republicans thought they would do better. Reid’s victory in Nevada is an especially bitter pill for them to swallow.

Republicans also did very well in governor and state legislature races, which is quite important for redistricting.

But who cares about who won the races. How were my predictions? It looks like my guess of 62 net new seats for Republicans will be very close, if not completely accurate. My estimate of 7 new Senate seats for Republicans also may be correct, depending on what happens in Colorado and Washington (and whether Lisa Murkowski caucuses with the GOP). But I did screw up on my tiebreaker prediction that Reid would lose his Senate seat in Nevada. I did enter the Cato betting pool, so I might wind up winning a few bucks.

Here’s a picture from last night, featuring yours truly and Congressman-Elect Colonel Allen West. He carries a well-thumbed copy of the Constitution everywhere he goes. He has the ability to shake things up in DC, especially if he abides by the oath he will be taking to support and defend that document from all enemies foreign and domestic.

4 Responses

Political scientist Jude Wanniski would have predicted this outcome because with their SADISTIC, oops! excuse me, with their SOCIALISTIC measures that increased the power & control & punishment & tax & spend by the political class they did much damage to people and people reacted by massively rejecting their sadistic agenda.

These elections were SO AWESOME! In my opinion they were like a Fall of the Berlin Wall in miniature.

I will do a bet too: I bet this election shows the definite defeat of John Maynard Keynes pseudoscience among common people: All the winning candidates that I saw on TV said a very revealing bunch of similar things: They talked about government being a burden and not a solution (i.e. about keynesian “stimulus” ). They talked about limited spending and balanced budget (again, “stimulus” and deficit spending). They talked about repeal of Obamacare (i.e., they talked against the keynesian pseudoscience demonization of savings and the divinization of consumption that justifies the disastrous pay as you go social security scheme that IMHO ruined the growth of the industrialized nations)

I think this victory is utter significative because we just come out from one of the deepest crisis ever and many prominent Supply Siders were unable to predict it while some keynesians predicted it. Moreover, many Supply Siders, as Arthur Laffer, were downright wrong regarding housing. But it is clear that even with those failures by supply siders people see Supply Side Ecomomics -free market capitalism- as being the correct explanation of how the economy actually works and because of that I give so much importance to this particular victory.

IMHO This time it is different because of the internet: Today any person can read on the net how things actually are: people can read, for instance, your SUPERB papers on taxation and because of that keynesian pseudoscience will never again be mainstream among the people. Of course mainstream academia and media will go on for some time with their keynesian fantasies but the will fade out slowly along with co2 demonizing pseudoscience and many other promoted-by-politicians pseudosciences